You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Campus Communities’ category.
An excerpt from my dissertation:
President Nixon revealed the US invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970, in a televised speech. At a news conference the next day National Student Association president Charles Palmer, flanked by ten collegiate student body presidents, denounced the invasion and Nixon’s “odious disregard of the constitution” and called for his impeachment.
The nation’s first student strikes in response to the invasion had already been called by the time Palmer spoke, and by Monday walkouts had begun, with NSA’s enthusiastic support, at dozens of campuses. Throughout the weekend NSA staff worked with an impromptu national strike center at Brandeis University to coordinate, encourage, and publicize strike activity as best they could.
Many campuses closed as the protests escalated, but Kent State in Ohio stayed open, and that state’s governor — facing a deteriorating situation on campus in the final stages of a tight re-election race — called out the National Guard. On Monday, a little after noon, Guard troops on the campus fired on a crowd of protesters. The gunfire killed four people, including two students who were walking past the protest on their way to class.
This was not the first time, or even the first time in recent years, that American students had been killed by agents of the government in the course of a campus protest. In early 1968 police had fired on anti-segregation activists at South Carolina State University, killing three. And it would not be the last — nine days after Kent State, two students at Jackson State College in Mississippi were killed in circumstances similar to those of the South Carolina shootings.
But unlike in South Carolina and Mississippi, the students killed at Kent State were white. And crucially, the Kent State killings were documented on film — a Kent State photography major took two rolls of photos of that day’s protest and its aftermath, and his photographs went out over the AP wire that night. One image — of a young woman kneeling over the body of one of the dead, screaming with arms outstretched — appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the country the next day. The Kent State killings unleashed an unprecedented wave of protest, forcing hundreds of campuses to close for the semester.
The New School Free Press has published a full transcript of an interview it conducted with New School president Bob Kerrey last month. In it, Kerrey talks about how officials monitor Twitter during protests, says that someone getting “knocked to the ground” isn’t police brutality, and appears to promise that a student will be seated on the New School board of trustees before long.
Kerrey has been the subject of intense criticism from students and faculty alike during his tenure at the New School, and the NSFP interview took place just twelve days after a student occupation of a campus building that was aimed — in part — at forcing his resignation. That occupation, the second at the New School in the last six months, ended in nearly two dozen arrests.
Extended excerpts follow…
“No one likes to be a rat,” University of Minnesota vice provost for student affairs Jerry Rinehart said today. But he’s hoping at least a few students will do it anyway.
The U of M plans to put up a website featuring recognizeable photographs and video of participants in last weekend’s off-campus riot, and will encourage students to anonymously identify those pictured. The information gathered in this way will be turned over to the police. (see update below)
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the Daily, the U of M student newspaper, does not intend to grant the university access to the more than one thousand photos its staff photographers took at the riot.
April 29 update: University officials are giving varying statements about whether website IDs would be turned over to the cops. The Minnesota Daily says Rinehart told them that such students “would most likely face University code of conduct punishment, not criminal charges,” but says that the campus police intend to “forward any information they receive from the website that involves criminal activity to [the Minneapolis Police Department].”
In an article on the weekend’s student rioting at Kent State, the Associated Press makes the following claim:
“It was the first clash between Kent State students and police since 1970, when four students were killed by Ohio National Guard troops during a campus protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.”
Ouch. That’s really really not true.
First, as Kent State’s student newspaper reported in the fifth paragraph of its article on the weekend riots, 81 Kent students were arrested when Halloween parties in and around the campus got out of hand last year. That’s less than six months ago.
Also, as the AP itself notes, the 1970 “clash” wasn’t between students and police, since National Guard troops aren’t cops. Finally, there have been lots of student protests where students clashed with cops at Kent State since 1970 — a two-minute Google turned up this page about a series of 1977 protests on campus that led to about two hundred arrests.
Student protest and student rowdiness are both common on American campuses — they were common before the sixties, and they’ve been common since. An AP reporter really shouldn’t have to be told this.
Update: Dear Volokh Conspiracy, if you’re going to make the title of a blog post a question, you really should enable comments.
Student parties turned into riots at two American colleges last night.
At the University of Minnesota, an off-campus student party associated with the campus’s Spring Jam got rowdy when a fire was built in the middle of a street. Bottles and rocks were reportedly thrown at police, who retaliated with tear gas, pepper spray, and “foam rounds.”
Here’s commenter Sun from the Minnesota Daily website with a first-hand perspective:
“I wouldn’t call this a riot as much as a large get-together that was slightly out of hand. People were not hurting each other or raiding houses. There was a strong communal understanding of respect, however, there was some bottle smashing and fire starting. If you were there you know what I’m trying to get at … the majority of the activity was allotted to mere standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs.”
Standing and conversing with occasional sing-a-longs, bottle smashing, and fire starting. Got it.
Only four people were arrested in the UM incident, but KentNewsNet is reporting that police made 125 arrests in the course of an off-campus confrontation at Kent State. There, participants suggest that the party turned into a riot because of police action.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments